Alpha glowing text animation

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

How would you go about making the following:

http://www.flasheff.com/patternsshowcase/patterns/text/FETGlow.swf

Is it possible do create the effect such that the text can be replaced fairly easily with another phrase?

I have not used compositing yet: is that a good place to start?

Thank you!

2

Not exact, but sufficient for my purposes:

The Blend file:
http://github.com/thangalin/flyby/blob/master/models/text/name-template.blend

Feel free to adapt!